Gadgets Mobiles

When I first noticed that Adobe had released a Photoshop app for the iPhone, I thought ‘now why would anyone want a fully-featured Photoshop app on their phone?’…. At first blush my tired brain figured Adobe had somehow crammed many of their amazing photo and graphic editing features all into one handy app. Well, I was wrong… and I have to admit, what they’ve come up with is very useful.

The new Photoshop app for iPhone is FREE, and provides a lot of basic functionality for those looking to share, edit or tweak up photos taken on an iPhone. I played around with it a bit last night, and was pleasantly surprised at how intuitive and easy it was to use. There’s nothing too crazy here, you can crop your photos, adjust exposure, saturation, tint and even convert them to black & white. There’s also a ’sketch’ and ’soft focus’ filter you can apply by swiping your finger left/right across the screen to adjust the effect. Lastly, there are 8 ‘effects’ you can apply including a ‘vibrant’, ‘border’, and my favorite, ‘warm vintage’. Play around with them to see what you like. When done editing an image you can save and exit or save and upload the image via your Photoshop account.

Suppose that’s one more thing I should touch on before I go. The app ties in nicely with your free Photoshop.com account. Creation of the account is free, and doing so allows you to upload and share your images with the world (among other things).

For the first kick at the cat, I have to give the Photoshop App for iPhone one-and-a-half thumbs up. Surely Adobe will be working on a more feature-rich version for launch in the near future… Until then I’ll be happy with this one. However, I look forward to a more powerful app coming down the tubes from Adobe… Heck, I’d even pay for it, but I’m sure that’s what Adobe had in mind anyway. Just like a drug dealer, give ‘em a taste for free, then make ‘em pay from then on forward.

Check out Photoshop.com Mobile in the App Store >

Note: The images above illustrate some of the effects built-in to this app. Oh, and if you’re wondering, that’s my little pal ‘Buddy’ in the pictures